NVIDIA NVS 5200M vs NVIDIA NVS 5400M

The NVIDIA NVS 5200M is an entry-level, dedicated business graphics card for laptops. It should be based on the 28nm GF117 Fermi chip, but 40nm GF108 versions are also possible. According to the specifications, the NVS 5200M is very similar to the consumer GeForce GT 620M but with slightly reduced clock rates.

Architecture

The GF117 is based on the optimized Fermi architecture of the GF108 (GeForce GT 540M) chip and offers 96 shaders, 16 TMUs and 4 ROPs. Each shader core is clocked twice as fast as the rest of the graphics chip, a technique known as hot clocking. More detailed information on Fermi can be found on the GT 435M GPU page.

Performance

The 5200M supports a turbo mode up to 715 MHz and can provide a similar  performance like the GeForce GT 620M or 540M - despite the 64 bit memory interface.

Features

The shader cores (also called CUDA cores) can be used for general calculations with APIs such as CUDA, DirectCompute 2.1 and OpenCL. PhysX is theoretically possible, but the NVS 5200M may be too slow to handle both PhysX and 3D rendering for modern games. 3D Vision is not supported according to Nvidia.

According to Nvidia, the power consumption of the NVS 5200M should be below that of the GeForce GT 525M due to improved efficiency in the GF117 core architecture.

More details on the GF108 architecture can be found on the dedicated page of the GeForce GT 435M.

Performance

The performance of the NVS 5400M is slightly below the GeForce GT 630M due to the reduced core clock (660 MHz, 800 MHz Turbo). Nevertheless, most games of 2012 run fluently in medium detail settings.

Features

A novelty of the GF104, GF106 and GF108 chips is the support for Bitstream HD Audio (Blu-Ray) via HDMI. Similar to the Radeon HD 5730, the NVS 5400M can transfer Dolby True HD and DTS-HD bitstream without quality loss to a HiFi receiver.

The NVS5400M offers PureVideo HD technology for video decoding using the GPU. The integrated Video Processor 4 (VP4) supports feature set C and is able to fully decode MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 (MPEG-4 ASP - e.g., DivX or Xvid), VC-1/WMV9, and H.264 (VLD, IDCT, Motion Compensation, and Deblocking). Furthermore, the GPU is able to decode two 1080p streams simultaneously (e.g., for Blu-Ray Picture-in-Picture).

Through CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectCompute 2.1 support, the NVS 5400M can assist in general calculations. For example, the stream processor can encode videos considerably faster than can a modern CPU. Furthermore, physics calculations can be done by the GPU using PhysX (supported in Mafia 2 and Metro 2033). However, the GPU is generally not powerful enough to support both PhysX and high detail game settings at reasonable frame rates.

The power consumption of the graphics card should be similar to the GeForce GT 435M and is therefore suited for 15" or larger laptops. If idle, the chip is clocked at approximately 50/101/137 MHz (chip/shader/memory, respectively) in 2D mode and at 202/405/324 MHz in 3D mode to save power. Furthermore, the Fermi chip supports Optimus to automatically switch between the integrated Intel graphics card and the Nvidia GPU. The implementation of Optimus, however, is dependent on the laptop manufacturer.